Rupert Murdoch joins Twitter, pretend wife makes it interesting

Octogenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch has taken to Twitter.
He's quickly scooped up almost 100,000 followers but immediately
got in hot water for an off-the-cuff tweet about British
workers.

While Murdoch's troubled first tweets showed his
misunderstanding of how to use the at symbol (and some basic
grammar), his first big bust-up with the Twitter populace came as
an ill-received message.

While holidaying on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthelemy, he
wrote "maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!"
Twittering Brits weren't best pleased with the billionaire's
tweet.

Then things got interesting. A Twitter user called @Wendi_Deng, the name
of Murdoch's 43-year-old wife, wrote "RUPERT!!! delete tweet!".
Which he did. Deng then continued to send messages to Murdoch and
various other celebrities, and garnered media coverage of her own digital debut.

Her validity was confirmed by News International and she even
sported the "Verified Tick" on her profile, a little blue symbol
that lets you know that a Twitter profile is from the bonafide celebrity. Except, this time, both NI and Twitter got
it wrong. The account is actually a spoof.

"You have to wonder... why Twitter verified this account for a
full day. I never received any communication from them about this,"
the unnamed account holder wrote
in a coming-out
tweet. "I was as surprised -- and even a little alarmed -- when
I saw the Verified tick appear on the profile.

"It might be only a small matter, but you have to worry about
the management of News International and Twitter if they can both
readily confirm, for a while at least, that this was the account of
a very noted personality," the mystery prankster wrote.

Wired.co.uk asked Twitter for
comment. A spokesperson for the social network told us, "we don't
comment on our verification process but can confirm that the
@wendi_deng account was mistakenly verified for a short period of
time. We apologise for the confusion this caused."

Murdoch has had an interesting relationship with the internet.
In a 2009 article in Vanity Fair, biographer Michael Wolff
wrote that the mogul viewed the internet as "predatory", writing:
"For him it's a place for porn, thievery, and hackers."

Murdoch has also taken heat for erecting paywalls around the websites of his various news organisations
- including The Times and The Sunday Times - but
seemed to have a bit of a higher opinion of technology when his
empire launched iPad-only digital magazine, The Daily. Murdoch also tweets on an iPad.

The chairman also spent $580m on MySpace, in 2005 -- a year
before Mark Zuckerberg's competitor Facebook went
from a schools-only enterprise to a global phenomenon. News Corp
sold MySpace in 2011 to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for a
scant $35 million.